Paglia Pounds Obama Down and Out in One Round

Camille Paglia has this to say about the weak effete easy-to-beat inhabitant of the WH:

What is the administration's response to the murder of our ambassador [in Libya]? Nothing. Do we have a presidency or not? The ambassador's journal was lying on the floor for CNN to find, and it took weeks for the FBI to get there and spend a day--after sensitive documents were stripped long ago. The State Department has clearly become a morass of political correctness. Hillary and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice should resign. Of course the mainstream media were mum for weeks about the Libyan scandal. And that just empowers the right-wing in the country. The media's pampering and protection of Obama over the years simply led to his weakening--which was on excruciating public display at his first debate with Romney, who landed blow after blow.

Camille has stumbled on The Taranto Principle.

What is the Taranto Principle? It is a principle laid down by the Wall Street Journal's perceptive editorialist, James Taranto. Taranto, in his column "Best of the Web Today," surveys the media and reports daily on their output with special emphasis on their contradictions, hypocrisies and -- most deliciously -- imbecilities. Like all other thoughtful observers of American media, Taranto recognizes that they are heavily biased toward the Democratic Party and the left in general. Yet, while many who hold that this advances the Democratic Party and the left, Taranto believes that that it has a harmful effect on left-wing politics, often causing left-wing candidates to lose at the polls. According to the Taranto Principle, the media's failure to hold left-wingers accountable for bad behavior merely encourages the left's bad behavior to the point that its candidates are repellent to ordinary Americans. According to Taranto, in 2004 the media quietly went along with Senator Jean-Francois Kerry's exaggerated claims to heroism and military prowess, thus encouraging his braggadocio and leaving him utterly unprepared when his fellow vets stepped forward and demonstrated that he had been a dreadful showoff in Vietnam. Officers who had fought alongside him served up evidence that his exploits were embellished and sometimes completely made up. They cast doubt on his medals and most damningly reminded us that in testimony on Capitol Hill Kerry accused his fellow soldiers of war crimes. The vets reproduced the video, video that any journalist could have laid hands on. The vets' assault on Kerry is now called "Swift Boating" by left-wingers and journalists alike, who insist the vets' charges were "lies," though four years later it is apparent that the so-called lies composed an accurate rendering of blowhard Kerry's war record. Had the media treated his initial boasts with some skepticism, he might have been better prepared for the vets' response. The left-leaning media spoiled Kerry and brought out the worst in him to the revulsion of enough voters to lose him the election. Now the Taranto Principle can be seen in the reporting on Governor Sarah Palin. As a former mayor and sitting governor, she has about as much experience as former President Jimmy Carter had in 1976. Moreover, she obviously has more executive experience than the Democratic presidential candidate. Yet the media have let her experience become a vexed issue. Worse, at the highest level of media she has been subjected to unwarranted scurrilities that are without precedent in a presidential election. Just the other night an idiot comedy show portrayed her daughter and husband in an incestuous affair. The consequence of this is that Governor Palin is running away with the women's vote and doubtless picking up sympathetic men also.

Of course, McCain and Palin won, but she was more qualified than the imbecile Obama & the senile Biden neither of whom ever ran a lemonade stand in the private sector. She negotiated a major pipeline contract with a few oil companies for the State of Alaska and did a bang-up job. McCain was not as qualified.